NEW PERSPEX-TIVE
Like many restaurant enthusiasts, Ian Tran remembers his last dining-out experience, pre-lockdown. It was a weekend brunch at Sydney’s Saint Peter, and the lemon tart in particular was a standout.
Then Covid-19 came knocking. Vivid festival was cancelled; so, too, the bulk of work at his Rockdale laser-cutting studio, Domus Vim. The studio typically provides a number of Vivid installation artists with construction drawing and fabrication services, and works with retailers at other times producing display units.
To keep busy, the studio turned to creating its own range of furniture and products made from leftover pieces of acrylic that had accumulated over the years. Tran played around with making a Perspex wall mirror in the shape of an egg in a frying pan. Then he immortalised the Saint Peter lemon tart (pictured) in three-dimensional plastic form. “I love making random objects and pieces, and I love eating out,” explains Tran when asked what sparked the idea.
Since then, he’s given other Sydney restaurant dishes the plastic-fantastic treatment and showcased them on his Instagram account, Dinner à la Perspex. There’s A1 Canteen’s plate of curried eggs and sausages, the puddle of soft scrambled eggs rendered into rigid golden form; four plump pieces of bluefin tuna nigiri from Sokyo fashioned into shiny, solid decks; and the Neapolitan ice-cream sandwich from Totti’s, its sculptural form accentuated by the clean, sharp edges of laser-cut Perspex.
To replicate each of these dishes, Tran refers to his archive of food photos, then draws each element – a breadstick here, a cube of pineapple there – using architectural CAD software or Adobe Illustrator. The drawings are then scaled to size and laser-cut into a piece of the coloured acrylic.
Tran recently completed his Masters in Architecture, and his skills in this industry have served him well.
“In architecture, we’re trained to think in geometric shapes and spaces, and the theory of colours,” he says. “Surprisingly, it’s easy to apply this to food.”
Following positive feedback from chefs and the greater food community, Tran has set up an online store, where you can purchase some of the immortalised dishes, from $60 a piece. “This is kind of my homage to restaurants,” he says.